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When it comes to what we’re told about oil, there’s rhetoric and then there’s reality. Who can we believe? The media? Politicians? Environmental activists?

I'm waiting for my opportunity to see this. Don't expect it to be generally available.

It's not how old you are, it's how you got here.It's been a long road and not all of it was paved.A man is but a product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes. Gandhi

Originally Posted by Carol

When I judge someone's integrity one key thing I look at is - How does s/he treat people s/he doesn't agree with or does not like?
I can respect someone who I do not agree with, but I have NO respect for someone who puts others down in a public forum. That is the hallmark of someone who has no integrity, and cannot be trusted.

Gasoline prices at the pump have never been proven to be a direct consequence of oil price manipulation. But it's widely conjectured.

Believe me, I hate paying more just as much as the next person, but get over it.

Geopolitical tensions, supply constrictions, war, tyrants with spigots and other buyers are the real factors at work and they always have been. When risks go up, so do prices – that's the way free markets work.

Apple didn't produce nearly 115 million iPhones and iPads in 2011 for kicks. It did it because there's huge demand for its products and it can make big bucks.

Things are just more critical now because we've failed to develop a comprehensive energy policy over the past 50 years at a time when global demand is increasing rapidly in absolute terms.

The president wants votes in an election year; this is pure political pandering.

For example, China's per capital oil consumption has increased by 350% since the early 1980s.

The International Energy Agency estimates that China alone will account for 42% of global oil demand by 2015. And it is one of the slow growers with consumption rising a mere 100% in the last 10 years.

It's not how old you are, it's how you got here.It's been a long road and not all of it was paved.A man is but a product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes. Gandhi

Originally Posted by Carol

When I judge someone's integrity one key thing I look at is - How does s/he treat people s/he doesn't agree with or does not like?
I can respect someone who I do not agree with, but I have NO respect for someone who puts others down in a public forum. That is the hallmark of someone who has no integrity, and cannot be trusted.

It's not how old you are, it's how you got here.It's been a long road and not all of it was paved.A man is but a product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes. Gandhi

Originally Posted by Carol

When I judge someone's integrity one key thing I look at is - How does s/he treat people s/he doesn't agree with or does not like?
I can respect someone who I do not agree with, but I have NO respect for someone who puts others down in a public forum. That is the hallmark of someone who has no integrity, and cannot be trusted.

After hitting bottom in September 2008 — when its total of 117.9 million barrels was the lowest since World War II — domestic crude oil production has bounded back smartly. In January of this year, according to the Energy Information Administration, it reached 188.9 million barrels, a monthly total not seen since the 1990s.

The all-time high of 308.3 million barrels, reached in December 1970, doesn't seem so far off, mainly because there is so much oil still in the ground. The EIA now estimates that the U.S. holds 198 billion barrels in "technically recoverable" conventional crude.

This is oil that could be extracted with today's drilling technology, and it does not include "unconventional" oil that might be produced from shale and tar sands. Just last week, the U.S. Geological Survey pegged the technically recoverable crude outside the U.S. at 565 billion barrels.

Put another way, the U.S. is estimated to hold 26% of the world's 763 billions of crude oil that is believed accessible to drilling.

It's not how old you are, it's how you got here.It's been a long road and not all of it was paved.A man is but a product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes. Gandhi

Originally Posted by Carol

When I judge someone's integrity one key thing I look at is - How does s/he treat people s/he doesn't agree with or does not like?
I can respect someone who I do not agree with, but I have NO respect for someone who puts others down in a public forum. That is the hallmark of someone who has no integrity, and cannot be trusted.

With the latest estimate released April 18, world resources of undiscovered, technically recoverable, conventional resources are estimated at 565 billion barrels of oil; 5,606 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas; and 167 billion barrels of natural gas liquids (NGL).

These new estimates are for conventional oil and gas resources only. Unconventional oil and gas resources, such as shale gas, tight oil, tight gas, coalbed gas, heavy oil and oil sands, may be significant around the world, but are not included in these numbers.

It's not how old you are, it's how you got here.It's been a long road and not all of it was paved.A man is but a product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes. Gandhi

Originally Posted by Carol

When I judge someone's integrity one key thing I look at is - How does s/he treat people s/he doesn't agree with or does not like?
I can respect someone who I do not agree with, but I have NO respect for someone who puts others down in a public forum. That is the hallmark of someone who has no integrity, and cannot be trusted.

At midnight on April 11, a 940-foot tanker maneuvered into the dock at the oil terminal in Valdez, Alaska, carrying an unusual cargo for a returning ship.

Sloshing in its tanks were more than 12 million gallons of Alaskan crude, at least a quarter of the cargo the ship had carried away from Valdez two weeks earlier.

The Alaskan Explorer had sailed to a Washington refinery but was forced to return to Alaska with 300,000 barrels because the onshore storage tanks were too full to accept it, confirmed Anil Mathur, CEO of the Alaska Tanker Co., which owns the ship.

"Not the normal course of business," said John Kotula, one of the few outsiders privy to the incident because of his position as manager of the state of Alaska's environmental office in Valdez.

The tanker's inability to offload its oil underlines a startling reality: Stocks of crude oil in the U.S. have been for the last two years at historic highs, while Americans are using decreasing amounts of its most important product - gasoline.

But federal statistics show another recent development: West Coast refineries are decreasing their production as the domestic demand for gasoline shrinks.

"If there is so much crude oil around, why is the price of gasoline so high? Why is the price of heating oil so high?" asked Dan Lawn, an environmental consultant who was in the same job as Kotula for decades before he retired in 2005.

The BP refinery in northern Washington had been shut down due to a February fire when the Alaskan Explorer arrived there on April 6. But that doesn't explain the tanker's return to Valdez with a big load of oil. Refinery spokesman Bill Kidd acknowledged that in normal times, the ship would have offloaded the remainder of its cargo at one of three nearby refineries.

An unusual position

Hauling oil to Valdez - a remote town that still supplies a big portion of the West Coast's oil - is carrying the proverbial coal to Newcastle. It is a sign that the American oil industry is in a very un-accustomed place.

Government statistics show gasoline isn't selling the way it used to, and on any given day crude oil could be backed up in storage tanks ranging from Valdez to the San Francisco Bay to Long Beach.

"Valdez inventories are pretty high. Our inventories are high. Nobody is taking much crude on the West Coast," Kidd said.

So why aren't gasoline prices pushed downward by the forces of supply and demand?

"You've keyed into an interesting puzzle, a paradox," said Richard Newell, professor of energy and environmental economics at Duke University and until last year the head of the federal Energy Information Administration, an arm of the Energy Department that tracks industry statistics.

The answer is the power of the world market.

"We are tied to the global market, the global price for oil," said Rayola Dougher, senior economic adviser at the American Petroleum Institute. "We cannot secede."

The profitable oil production industry benefits from the fact that it operates within a global market. Fuel conservation in the United States cannot overcome the rising hydrocarbon demand in emerging markets like China and India, Newell said. The price stays up even where more local market pressures might force it down.

Nationally, the average retail price for all grades of gasoline as of last Monday was $3.93 a gallon, according to the Energy Information Administration - about the same as this time last year but up more than a dollar since April 2010. The highest prices are mostly on the West Coast.

Limited gesture

The Obama administration has proposed better oversight of the commodities market that trades in oil futures, but it is a limited gesture. The markets that set crude prices are different for Scandinavian, West Texas and Arabian oil.

"The dynamics in the United States are the opposite of what is occurring at a global level," Newell said.

When prices at American gasoline stations go down - or up - it will be for reasons other than U.S. intervention or our improved driving habits, he said.

Lower consumption hasn't brought U.S. prices down or eliminated our dependence on foreign oil. Even though exports are up, the United States still imports around 11 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products per day, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Consumer demand for gasoline in the U.S. started faltering in 2005 and has been falling "very sharply" since 2007, said Houston-based oil industry analyst Pavel Molchanov of Raymond James & Associates.

"We think (demand) is going to go down in perpetuity," Molchanov said.

People are driving less, because of the economy and the aging of baby boomers, said James Beck, a lead petroleum supply analyst for the Energy Information Administration. Newer cars get better mileage and are replacing the gas-guzzling older ones.

Toward natural gas

Meanwhile, natural gas is cheap. Buses and commercial vehicles are turning away from oil and toward compressed or liquid natural gas, and the petrochemical industry is replacing oil with natural gas for feedstock, Molchanov said.

Gulf Coast and West Coast refineries consequently are making more product than they can sell locally. They are exporting it, notably to Central and South America, in volumes not seen in half a century, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Some East Coast refineries face possible shutdowns because of falling demand and gasoline imports from Europe, Beck said.

"The surging growth in U.S. oil supply has turned North American crude dynamics upside down," industry analysts Cory Garcia and Stacey Hudson said in a March briefing paper distributed by Raymond James & Associates.

Advanced drilling technologies are sucking new crude oil supplies out of landlocked North Dakota, while a pipeline bottleneck at the key hub in Cushing, Okla., has slowed the path to refineries in Texas and Louisiana. The results are a glut of crude oil in the middle of the country, as well as environmental concerns about the drilling techniques.

"Clearly, it will take some time (and pipeline capacity) in order to fully clear this supply glut," Garcia and Hudson wrote.

Nearly full tanks

The storage tanks in Valdez were more than 90 percent full the day the Alaskan Explorer arrived with its odd load, said Michelle Egan, spokeswoman for terminal operator Alyeska. She downplayed the significance of those full tanks, noting that they were not so full a few weeks earlier.

But Egan also acknowledged that Alyeska officials begin worrying when the storage tanks at the terminal are over 90 percent full. Such a glut could force a slowdown of oil production on the North Slope. That would reduce flow in the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, she said, which can result in increased maintenance problems.

The price of gasoline, meanwhile, is still near four bucks a gallon.

"Both the supply side and demand side in the U.S. are moving in a direction that you would think would underpin falling prices," Newell said. "But the global market rules."

It's not how old you are, it's how you got here.It's been a long road and not all of it was paved.A man is but a product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes. Gandhi

Originally Posted by Carol

When I judge someone's integrity one key thing I look at is - How does s/he treat people s/he doesn't agree with or does not like?
I can respect someone who I do not agree with, but I have NO respect for someone who puts others down in a public forum. That is the hallmark of someone who has no integrity, and cannot be trusted.